Screen Actors Guild awards set to further expose Oscars' lack of diversity

As the Academy continues to confront criticism, success at the Sags on Saturday for stars such as Viola Davis, Queen Latifah and Idris Elba seems likely to further highlight how far film lags behind TV

‘Just think of the influence a black James Bond would have’ … Idris Elba, whose name has been linked to 007, and whose turn in Beasts of No Nation scored him a nomination from the Sags but not the Oscars

As the #OscarsSoWhite diversity crisis continues to engulf Hollywood, the annual round of awards ceremonies are under inspection as never before. On Saturday, the Screen Actors Guild – the performers’ trade union – will give out its honours in a ceremony that has traditionally been seen as a strong indication of where the Oscars will go. But with the film industry in a hypersensitive state – particularly with regard to black and minority-ethnic performers – the mood is more febrile than it has been since the dramatic protests of the 1970s.

The nominations list for the SAG awards reveals that, had Ampas (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) followed its lead, then it is arguable that the #OscarsSoWhite row would have erupted at all. African-set child-soldier drama Beasts of No Nation and NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton – two of the films considered most wronged by the Oscars’ perceived bias – are nominated for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture, and while the two best actor lists contain no black performers, Idris Elba received a best supporting actor nomination for his role as the brutal commandant in Beasts of No Nation.

The SAG awards also encompass TV, and here the nominations have again included black and minority-ethnic performers. Elba has a second nomination, as best actor in a miniseries or television movie, for his cop series Luther, while Arab-American actor Rami Malek is up for best actor in a drama series for Mr Robot. In the female actor categories, Queen Latifah is up for Bessie, a biopic of the blues singer Bessie Smith, Viola Davis for legal drama series How to Get Away With Murder and Uzo Aduba for her role as Crazy Eyes Warren in the prison show Orange Is the New Black.

Straight Outta Compton … the film’s stars are to be celebrated at the Sags; the Oscars have nominated the all-white screenwriters

For Remi Salisbury, researcher at the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies at the University of Leeds, the #OscarsSoWhite controversy “was something that needed to happen”. Even if the 2016 Oscars had managed to include nods in leading categories for the films Beasts of No Nation or Straight Outta Compton, Salisbury says: “This ‘whiteout’ happening two years running has really brought it to the fore, and made people start to criticise the whole industry. So it’s timely, in that sense.”

He adds: “It’s emblematic of a bigger problem. A lot of people commenting don’t even watch the Oscars, but they are aware of the larger problems, that they don’t see black people on the screen. It’s something that has galvanised them, rather than the Oscars being the problem per se.”

Salisbury agrees that, on the evidence of the SAG awards at least, the TV industry is doing a slightly better job than film in tackling diversity issues, but it, too, is mired in problems. “Uzo Aduba and Orange Is the New Black are up for awards, but the show is set in a prison and Aduba plays a character called Crazy Eyes. Given the common stereotypes of black criminality and incarceration, this role is not a threat to the status quo, or one that radically challenges racial stereotypes. It’s important to show the mundaneness and normality of black lives, and the everyday realities. The soaps try to do this, but they are still tokenistic.”